Global Dimming

Global dimming is the reduction of sunlight shining directly on the earth.  This is due to the air pollution and green house gases in the clouds that reflect the sunlight back into space, not letting it enter.  We would think that because the temperature of the earth is getting hotter studies would show this as well but through this video we found that temperature was not as much of a factor as actual sunlight is.  There are two effects going on within the world, the cooling effect and the heating effect.  The heating effect is something we have heard of much more than the cooling effect.  This heating effect deals with the amount of carbon dioxide and other green house gases that are being release into the earth’s atmosphere.  Studies have shown that the cooing effect has had a dropping off in that the earth is not cooling itself down as much as it has in the previous decades and centuries.  With this decrease and the increase of green house gasses we are looking at a "double wammy" as one scientist put it.  The most disastrous aspect of this continued increase is the potential for frozen methane gasses from the bottom of the ocean to be release.  They become destabilized by the warming of the planet are eight times stronger than carbon dioxide.  Some scientist believed that the heating of the earth by 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit will become a reality by the end of the century, while others now believe this could happen by midcentury because of our increased emissions of green house gases. Without the decrease in these emissions our path to disaster is inevitable.